


In Omnia Paratus

by hauntedd



Category: Roswell (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2013-12-24
Packaged: 2018-01-05 21:09:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedd/pseuds/hauntedd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tess, through the years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Omnia Paratus

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scribblemyname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/gifts).



**Six**

She wakes up in darkness, eyes wide as the compulsion to break free stirs her into action and she pushes through the gelatinous wall with all the strength her small body can handle, biting her bottom lip as she realizes that it may just not be enough. The fluid burns her lungs as she struggles against it and tries hard not to breathe.

Darkness pricks at the corners of her view, imbuing the blurry visage with ominous black and grey hues as strength starts to leave her. She struggles one last time, but nothing happens and she begins to relent, her strength fading with every passing second.

However, just when she’s about to give up, a loud noise assaults her ears and something grips at her as the liquid dissipates and she’s thrust into the world. Greedily she swallows, her lungs inhaling at a rapid rate and after a moment she opens her eyes to stare at her rescuer.

He’s tall and nondescript, but the way he looks at her, expressionless and bored causes the girl to shiver, and not from the cold. She steps backward into the darkness, bare feet padding against cool rocks and her blue eyes notice the glowing emptiness of pods opened for the first time.

She opens her mouth to cry out, but all that spills from her are tears and the salty wetness stings the corners of her eyes. 

“They’re gone,” the man replies to her unasked question, using sounds that mean nothing until she’s older. “They thought you were useless, nothing worth saving. I’m the only one who’s here for you.”

**Eight**

When she’s sick and tired of constant lessons in how to make people see what isn’t really there, which she consistently fails at achieving, Tess runs to the fields behind her home. There are cats there and while the mother is somewhat wary of the child, the kittens have taken to her like fast friends.

She names them and keeps them a secret from Nasedo, sneaking leftovers after dinner to feed the barn cats and leaving water dishes that she fills and cleans from a nearby stream. It’s something to keep her busy after school, before he comes home and instills another lesson in honor and duty—sharp and quick to her senses and she can indulge in fantasies of being a normal little girl with friends.

The smallest one, a little tuxedo that’s more sociable than the others, she’s named Prince. He comes to greet her every day and tangles himself between her legs while his brothers and sisters watch. He’s her secret favorite because he _loves_ her more than the rest, but she loves them all because they play with her while the kids at school keep their distance.

Nasedo, she thinks, doesn’t love her at all.

After a few months, when the streets are illuminated with Christmas lights and everyone in Glen Burnie is eagerly awaiting Santa, because _they_ are allowed little lies to hide the big truth, a blizzard comes and she can’t get over there until a few days later—it’d be too obvious with Nasedo home from work and the roads unplowed.

She’s worried and anxious about her friends, but she hopes that they’ll be okay. 

Once the roads are plowed and his car leaves the driveway, and she’s truly, blissfully alone—there’s no school to contend with on winter break. Tess sneaks away to the barn, purple gloves covering her hands, only to find no one there to greet her.

Her heart is beating in her chest and Tess **knows** that they’ve left her behind. It’s what she does when they get too attached, well, what happens _she_ gets too attached. Nasedo doesn’t get attached to anyone or anything—humanity is a disease that he can’t catch. But somehow she’s infested with it, emotions grow up like weeds and, if she’s honest with herself, she likes feeling things. 

It makes her feel alive. Even now, when her eyes are burning and her cheeks are streaked with cold, wet tears.

She turns to leave and then she hears it, a pathetic, quiet meow that only has ever come from one cat—Prince, her Prince, who waited for her when her **real** prince didn’t. She rushes over, her frown now a huge grin, only to see his hind leg bent backwards and laying lame behind his body.

“Oh no, what happened to you,” she gushes, her voice wavering as her eyes sting all over again. She pets the cat and thinks, really thinks, about her next move.

If Nasedo were here—she stops the line of thinking in its tracks. She knows what he would **expect** and yet, she can’t do it. She knows it as well as she knows anything and instead of doing what he’d want, she reaches a tenuous hand toward the injured leg and hopes that unlike mindwarping, she can actually **do** this.

The feeling is electric, like a million pinpricks of static flowing through her arm and she’s unsure that things are working right until a soft glow emanates from her palm and fur knits back together as visions that are not _human_ and certainly not her own flash before her eyes.

She sees it, then. Nasedo, in the barn, in that sweater he wore two days ago, all the other kittens around him, unsuspecting, **unknowing**.

She pulls her hand back, stunned and angry. He **knew** about her, about _them_ and he just—took them away. Permanently.

Only Prince had survived, hiding out, scared and hungry and injured—all because she had cared enough to love them, love these cats, and it eats her up inside. She looks down at Prince, his eyes wide and his leg back in place and Tess starts crying all over again. Violent, shaking sobs that echo in the empty barn. Prince tries to calm her, rubbing his body all over her as his purrs pick up and yet all it does is make her feel worse.

She’s done this—brought her cat friends to their deaths. Without her, the kittens would be alive, all the kittens, not just Prince who is an orphan now, just like her.

Her throat is raw and scratchy when she finally leaves the barn and doesn’t look back. Prince tries to follow at first, he doesn’t know what it’s like to be alone, but he’ll learn, just like she has—and then he’ll forget about her, just like all the rest.

On the way home Tess promises herself that she’ll try harder to ignore her emotions. That she’ll listen and try to destroy things, memories mostly, like Nasedo wants so he can’t destroy living ones.

Humanity isn’t worth it if it only gets others killed. 

**Ten**

It takes her two years and three states before she’s successful. Despite Nasedo’s insistence that this used to be her strongest gift, mindwarping is **hard** and it feels unnatural in a way that healing never did. 

Of course, she hasn’t healed anything since Maryland, but she still remembers the sensation in her weaker moments, when Nasedo’s fists are buried in her chest and his frustration is palpable.

He claims later that it’s meant to make her _stronger_ and that since she’s ten, now, her training has to increase. Tess, of course, doesn’t buy it and tells herself that it will be over eventually, when she finds her family and they **go home**.

She’s a princess there, or so he claims, and that means he won’t be able to hit her after that. This skin may be as temporary as this life, but it’s still the only one she has at present and she hopes that something, anything, will change.

But hopes are meaningless and **human** in a way that actions are not. So, Tess is relieved when it manages to work and she gets Miss Miller, her piano teacher—in Erie, Tess is a _pianist_ —to think that she has a brother Jimmy. Jimmy’s older and a prodigy. He’s composed three original pieces already with more on the way—the kind of story that thrills smaller towns, especially ones near the Canadian border.

After a week, Miss Miller seems off kilter and she wonders if she’s the only person to notice. She starts tapping her fingers and muttering things under her breath that make no sense and yet Nasedo doesn’t say a thing and her piano lessons continue, even though Miss Miller rarely notices her mistakes. 

She doesn’t really notice anything at all.

Her decline is quick and sudden, and it feels like her brain is a car that’s turned a corner too fast and careening down a hill. Her words slur and the tapping increases and she grows thinner as March flows into April. People whisper about crazy Miss Miller and her family—they all have dark circles under her eyes. She’s tried, secretly of course, to reverse whatever she’s done. Erase the illusion of Jimmy Harding, her protective older brother that never was, but she _can’t_. 

Nasedo’s never taught her that—and she doubts he’d want her to learn.

In May, Miss Miller stops teaching her piano. Not that she’d been truly teaching her much, lately, when she spends most of their allotted hours staring into space and tapping, always tapping, to a tune that only she can here. But it’s not until Memorial Day that things escalate even further and the house catches on fire. It’s nearly 3 a.m. when the sirens wake her as they race down the street and the sky is lit in oranges and reds like nothing she’s ever seen before.

Nasedo takes her outside in her Power Rangers pajamas and grips her shoulder. She shirks at first, expecting a blow or two, but instead he hugs her for the first time.

“I’m so _very_ proud of you,” Nasedo whispers and Tess doesn’t know what to make of that.

It’s all so awkward and strange and yet the little girl that she buries deep inside, the one that wants love and comfort and all the things that the rest of the girls—the human ones—take for granted is comforted by this. It’s what she’s wanted for years and now she has it, even if she knows it comes with a price.

She finds out quickly just, what, this momentary bit of normalcy cost her when the paramedics wheel out body after body. All four Millers, including the baby—dead.

And Tess knows it’s because of her.

But when the dust settles and the fire’s been put out all Tess can reflect on is how it felt to finally get what she’d always wanted. Love, or at least the closest he can get to it and somehow, some way, it makes this all slightly more _okay_.

If she were human, she wouldn’t think this way—not ever. But, she’s a hybrid, and the rules are different, like Nasedo keeps trying to tell her. Only now, after this, she’s willing to listen.

**Fourteen**

The dreams start around the same time her period does. She doesn’t tell Nasedo because she doesn’t think he expects them to happen, for her to actually remember life **before** when can’t make sense of it. And remember she does—of course; nothing seems to line up with the stories he’s been telling through the years.

She shouldn’t be shocked by now. But she is—despite every warning, he’s still the closest thing that Tess has to a father and every lie, every cruelty, cuts just as deeply as the first.

Zan never loved Ava—not like they do in the movies, anyway, because that’s the only examples she’s ever been given of true love to go by. So she’s run with them all these years, and bought into the lies she’s told herself that the boy who once was Zan will remember her while falling back into patterns established in the stars and through history. Rath and Vilondra would be there too, the family she’s been missing. If Rath and Zan’d been with her, Nasedo wouldn’t hit her—he wouldn’t **dare**. But they’re not, she has the bruises to show for it, and so it’s been the promise of finding them that’s kept her fighting and refining her abilities for so long.

Instead, Zan had never loved Ava, even if she’d loved him. She’d been chosen as a bride, as a _queen_ , because of her lineage and her family’s relationship with the Granolith. They’d needed soldiers to fight a war and her father had the largest army on the planet.

A wife for an army—even on other planets, women were traded like chess pieces, and the luster of Antar fades a little with every new memory.

But this is Earth, not Antar, and her name is Tess, not Ava. Which means that this boy—her destiny—may not be Zan, either. And there are merely four of them on the whole planet, so it’s not like she’s got a lot of competition when the other female hybrid is his **sister**. 

So she steels herself against every new recollection of a life very unlike the one she has now and vows that this time will be different. Tess will be **_enough_** for him because Ava couldn’t be and she’s **not** Ava this time. After all, Ava couldn’t mind-warp; she could only heal and create huge explosions,—but she, **Tess** , has gotten really good at it.

 _So good_ , a little voice, the one she tries to ignore that lives in the dark recesses of her soul, whispers, _that she could probably_ make _him love her, if she needed to_ —but she hopes she doesn’t. It’s just that Tess is unsure she’s loveable at all—she only knows how to break ties, not build them. Nasedo’s made sure of that. He’s made sure of a lot of things, and yet, late at night, under the cover of darkness, Tess finds herself mourning the girl she’d once been, both on Antar and, for a short while, on Earth, with so much love to give, and so little received in return.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope I haven't broken your heart too much--I just, I wanted to write a fic that was true to Tess' experience and showed how, exactly, things were for her before getting to Roswell. It just--wasn't easy for her and I think her upbringing with Nasedo often gets glossed over. You know?


End file.
